In memoriam
It is true that she launched a rock into the head of a boy with a close crew cut and made his temples bleed. He was crouching over the ground and playing marbles with the other boys. It is true that she wrapped a love note around the rock. It is true that she took a cigarette lighter to her hair. That she loved Frankie Goes to Hollywood before she learned to read. It is true that she learned Italian by reading her father’s [ ] mags. It is true that before she started [ ] her father had a habit of [ ] his [ ] into [ ] [ ] It is true, her mother said, that she sometimes exaggerated. It is true, her teacher said, that she didn’t like community service and receiving criticism. It is true that she learned how to [ ] to Electric by the Cult. Wild honey child, etc. It is true that her favorite words are wild and fire. It is true that her first kiss was with a pretty glue huffer. It is true that a butch girl fisted her once into the sternum. It is true that she had a thing for [ ] and androgyny. It is true that she once charmed a cop on the streets of a war-torn town, so much so a foreigner proposed to her on the spot, called her his destiny. The foreigner was a Capricorn rising so of course he got [ ] when he saw a woman work her way with authority. It’s true that her Venus was in detriment. And that a man once threw a [ ] at her. It’s true that sometimes she felt cinematic. Like when that cute doctor made her sit topless in a cold examination room, then lowered his face down to her heart level and gazed at her lumpy [ ]. It’s true that she’d make herself [ ] when stuck in traffic. It’s true that she once [ ] a man for nine hours straight. It’s also true that his wife called him BC, short for Beautiful [ ]. It’s true that every stranger on the phone who promised her a big hard [ ] turned out to be a drunk with a short fat [ ]. It is true that beautiful men made her feel like she was a sleek silver fish with a hot hook in her lip. That is all. That is all she had. Half a lip. Its wild burn. Blood on her teeth.
Food
A man asks a woman out for lunch to a café with a pepto-pink patio. She orders pomegranate parfait and he fried chicken biscuit. Afterwards she gives him a blow job in his car. Next time they meet, he takes her out to a Japanese joint. He wants to do something nice for her because she drove six hours to see him. He suggests a sushi and sashimi moriawase, hot sake. She asks for a tuna roll and tea. That night they have sex on the sofa and fall asleep in their clothes. After abortion she gives him her oxies. When he is in town next, she leaves her husband and goes to a store to get wine. She isn’t sure what kind he likes, so she buys three types, plus a purple port, and meets him in a vacant studio. They open a red blend and pour it into solo cups. The cups get slippery while they fuck on the futon. Her anus bleeds for days. He stops by in winter. In one hand she holds a bowl of beetroot and nasturtium, with the other she lifts her skirt up. He eats with unwashed hands. In spring they drive through the Lowcountry. He insists to take her to a nice restaurant. But a nice place is impossible to find. He’s upset. She says it’s okay, she doesn’t care about food that much. This upsets him even more. A strange undercurrent is at works. The sky starless. Dark as a grave. As a walnut. As an empty gut. They go to sleep hungry that night and they never have another meal again.
tarot reading
you have the skills to endure significant solitude. clean out the closet of your heart. you have free will. the tower is reversed—you must bring the house down first. see, four of wands reversed: things are going on and you don't get to be in the party. you are not in the good love life party. but a wand is a wand, I argue, bottom up or down! I know a man who one morning went to the market to buy sardines and that night, while he was frying them up for dinner, his heart gave up. a roof is just a cover, no matter what it’s made of, terracotta tiles or busted floorboards shielding you like crucifixes. plus who’s to say that’s me standing in the piles of debris, looking for the old red silk rose to pin into the hair. who’s to say that’s not you, my dear reader, my wild card, waving in there, oh hello goodbye help!
in praise of distance
it's time to disobey the ordinance of fog. time to not answer the phone, to unbum that last cigarette. it’s high time America opens its windows and lays off ice. it’s time to build a boat and row home. to remember an inviolate someone. a domestic ass. the arthritic fig. a ribbed bowl with slippery guts of sea bass. it’s time to unspool. to undust the South and unmist the river. it is time to unbloom. to unpetal the story: one gets lost for a petal. a ring is put on it before the end of another. then talk of promise for two wild waxy petals. petals later, the fog lifts. one finds the way out. the other is left praising the distance—
A few truths and a few lies
I love Jesus and Kenny, whoever Kenny is. I’m a genius at dressage and my favorite food is tripe. You’re taking a late-night bath and sending me a pic. We plan the future: your desk next to mine on the second-floor landing. Yours is neater. We pick tyrants: the Party or the Church. Mississippi is blessed. Balkan is an abandoned resort with phenomenal PR. I’m Lady Illyria standing before you, skirt up, and you, tongue-out, kneel before me. It’s how I colonize America. Days butt each other the way the calendar taught them. They push through the square frames and defenestrate. We go to a wedding at the Spanish ruins. Even the Spanish ruins in America are American. A geriatric band plays “Stayin Alive.” The stage is made of magnolia leaves. People dance like horses. We drive down the dark interstate of the tongue and run over a hare. The nightsky rips open. A buck knife flashes its stiff blade. We go to a wedding at the ruins. A geriatric band plays “Stayin Alive.” On the stage made of linden Tomaž Šalamun is horsing around. The morning that’s been years in the making arrives filled with sleep. They find you. In a tub. In a river. Underground. I love Jesus and Kenny, and other stallions, too. Your obit is a skit. Is horsehit. You’re taking a bath. Sending me a pic. I’m looking at your face. I touch my face. Pater noster, etc. I’m bent over—Šalamun is doing a pirouette, his shirt ripped open.
Therapeutic Hold
Another sudden southern spring in a dangerous and delicate business of making us stop breathing just enough our eyelids flutter and legs twitch. The understory of dogwood foaming at the mouth, the hemorrhage of terminal myrtles, the flowering quince cracking the seal in its messy habit, littering the ground with marginalia of internal narratives, closed loops and detours—what has survived the winter’s chokehold.
I once knew a man who spent a decade restraining patients in a psych ward. He’d come home after work, pick me up like a fistful of bergamot, root and all, and hold me, still standing, as time would speed up and slow down, as if love was a survival skill and this was the final round before elimination. His arms bruised from putting down the convulsing proletariat, the bleeding spitting combative psychotic he’d talk about and I understood little of. His grip was home for a spell, and I was his first red-rumped swallow of the season.
Spring is a sanity thief. Someone, please staple its mugshots to telephone poles, above bloodroots and the wilding Black-Eyed Susans. Someone, please help us in the hour of its involuntary grip.
Our House
The exhibit consists of simultaneous, ongoing performances in five rooms from which viewers, one by one, can enter and exit. As each viewer enters a room, lights go up slowly.
ROOM ONE
A white sparsely furnished room. A window on the side wall, with slanted window blinds. A bed with light, white bedding. Instead of the night tables, minimal shelves extend by each side of the headboard. There are a couple red solo cups, a cell phone, and a vape. On the bed a handsome naked man starts to wake up, groggy, reaches for water. We can hear the shower running in the bathroom.
VOICE OVER:
Countries pick their people, swiping left and right on Golden Citizen app.
Every square meter of land you ever walked lives inside you like a tenant.
Every temporary place of residence is a sovereign country.
That is not you, that is not us, these are not our lives.
ROOM TWO
A therapist’s lobby. Soft, muted interior with beige brocade wallpaper and plush sofa chairs. Instrumental music is softly playing, Brian Eno. Two men sit in opposite corners, look at their phones and avoid eye contact while waiting for the therapist to invite them in. From inside the therapist’s office, we hear muffled party-like laughter.
VOICE OVER: Countries don’t do therapy. They set up meetings, get together, and so on, but they’re not in a business of reaching resolutions, improvement, etc. You’re looking at it all wrong.
Pause. In a hushed voice.
The therapist, he’s just the guy with the full bar.
ROOM THREE
We are in Loi Bazaar in Uttar Pradesh, a buzzing Indian bazaar that extends through a network of narrow streets lined with tightly packed booths filled with woven fruit baskets, stacks of textiles, lassi, chaat, rasmalai, and jalebi vendors. Booths are covered with banners: Chaitanya Tulsi, Ayurveda, and numerous other ones in Sanskrit. We see the market as if we were sitting in a richshaw that passes through the streets that are projected onto the walls of the room. A slender pale cow saunters by, swatting flies with its tail. A sadhu in saffron robes passes by a storefront covered in bright yellow UltraTech Cement ad, through a knot of bike traffic, its beeps and rings. Women in colorful saris pass by the side of the road, and white men with shaved heads and long robes chant while checking out the shops.
The scene switches to the streets of Venezia, the open market across the pedestrian bridge that brings visitors from the bus station. The booths are packed with Venetian mask and gelato vendors. Migrant vendors, from Senegal, Bangladesh and other places stand next to spread blankets in front of them and sell designer fakes, purses, bags, sunglasses. They yell “vu compra” at passersby.
The scene shifts to LA, the corner of Centinela Ave and Venice Blvd with a woman offering elotes and equites, to the Piñata district with taco carts, huaraches and chicharrónes, pupusa and agua fresca booths.
Once again the scene turns, this time to an abandoned, desolate flee market in a desert town. We hear the raspy hiss of a vulture, then the heavy flap of its wings. Only one table is filled with goods: from vintage clothing and cassette tapes to old toys, telephones and typewriters to militaria, framed photos of dead dictators and war criminals.
ROOM FOUR
The Hague Penitentiary. Scheveningen, Netherlands. UN Detention Unit. Two prison cells next to each other. Two older men enter the scene from opposite ends of the room, towards their respective cells, and before they enter them, they look and slowly nod at each other. They lift their hands and touch each other’s fingertips and slowly enter their respective cells. As they connect, “You Are the Inspiration” by Chicago starts playing.
ROOM WITHOUT A NUMBER
As the lights come on, the installation in the center of the room is revealed: a model consisting of 5-foot walls made of different materials. They look like scattered large-scale domino blocks. In front of the model, the artist gives her talk.
ARTIST (In a measured unaffected manner.): I have planned this exhibition of border landscape to be explored. I wanted the viewer to experience this on a sensory level. So, please follow me…
Slowly walks and pauses.
So, when we explore the environment around us, there is always something we see on the ground, right? And something on the eye level. And of course, there is always something in the sky. Right? So, here we have a fence. You can touch it. It’s okay to touch it.
Pause.
In nature we also have different colors, right. Different movement. Notice the breaking of color here.
Points to another, barbed wire fence.
The light and its movement affect us. Lack of light limits our movement.
Lights momentarily go off in the room.
And we affect them, too. We can block light with a simple concrete wall, like this one over there. Or capture it in a lamp.
The lights in the room intensify their neon brightness.
And here, follow me, please, onto the road. Notice the cameras. Their watchful eyes. Please stay on the road. This is a model, so we have less space than we would on the field. Touch the ground. It feels just like a real road, right. Feel the heat?
Pause. Continues slowly walking.
And this bit of green. It’s easy on the eye, right. So, landscape also has things we cannot see.
See in the distance, there is a ridge. And beyond it is a mountain. Notice the pink skirting the edge of the mountain.
Artist points at the projected mountain on a wall.
Bright pink is the oldest color on geological record.
Long pause.
And what is beyond the mountain?
Pause.
Light. More light. As you can see light is a material I am very interested in. You see, every barrier, every sensor and watchtower needs light. Right. And machine guns, too. Would you like to experience them, in this safe space?
Artist reaches into the pocket of her overalls and pulls out a small remote.
When activated they shoot out ice-cold pins.
Notice how on one side of this wall there is light, and on the other side there is also light. Right.
Brief pause.
Light is the first material since the beginning of existence.
Pause.
I wanted to open this up to your interpretation.
ROOM FIVE
Acting Class. A dozen students dressed in black Lycra are doing a mirroring activity. They are grouped in pairs and face each other. The teacher, a gray-haired, lithe woman takes a sip of water from her bottle and pulls a new, unpaired student in plain clothing out to model the activity.
TEACHER: Follow my movement, sweety. Slow, steady. We are learning universal commonality.
The student is mimicking the slow circular movement of the arms and the slight sway of the teacher’s legs.
TEACHER: Good. Now, repeat after me. (Loudly enunciates.) You have two eyes.
STUDENT: To lighthouse—
TEACHER (Whispers to the student): Just repeat the same thing that I say: You have two eyes. (Clears her throat.) You have two feet.
STUDENT: Olive tree.
TEACHER (Whispers again): You don’t understand. Just say you have two feet! (Loud, so the class can hear her.) You have two legs.
STUDENT: I have two bollards.
TEACHER (Frustrated): You have hair.
STUDENT: I have sea urchin.
Students in the background laugh. The teacher ignores them.
TEACHER: You have a stomach.
STUDENT (Fast): Grotto.
Students in the back curl into fetal position and begin to impersonate each line the foreign student says. This gradually turns into a dance.
TEACHER: You have shoulders.
STUDENT (Fast): I have cliffs.
TEACHER (Barks): You have clavicles.
STUDENT (Raises her voice): I have shipyard.
TEACHER: You have teeth.
STUDENT (Louder): Chipped limestone.
TEACHER: You have hair. Hair on your head.
STUDENT (Sings): Anemone, anemone, anemone.
TEACHER: You have breasts.
STUDENT (Pulls her shirt open): Wings of gulls.
TEACHER: You have palms.
STUDENT (Spreads her arms, palms up, towards her): Frozen seabreams.
TEACHER: You have an abdomen.
STUDENT (Grips her stomach): Buoy in winter fog.
TEACHER: You have a body.
STUDENT (Straightens up): I have home.
TEACHER: You have (emphasizes) “a” home.
STUDENT (Looks aside): An elegy I have.
TEACHER: (Pours a glass of water. Hands the student the glass of water.): You have a mother.
STUDENT (Looks her in the eyes. Long pause.): In my mouth. Drowning.
Student pours the water onto the floor.
In the sea in the middle of the earth. Drowning.
The rest of the students in the background make swimming motions towards the exit. We hear the sea.
And in my mouth. Drowning.
Lights down. Black.